We know a lot more than that. We know he is a career criminal with several prior convictions. We know he sold his users out to the authorities before. We know he enjoys publicity and living large. We know his motivation is money.
We also know that he knew and strongly encouraged infringing material being uploaded.
There is a reason for the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy. Too many people,
In dubio pro reo is a formula binding the court, not people's opinion. You are mixing legal with popular reasoning.
Only when you have answers to at least these basic questions should you even consider opining on him.
No, stupid. I live in the real world where I can have an opinion on other people without going through six years of fact-finding, proceedings and appeals first. Society works that way, it doesn't work the other way. The courts work that other way, and that's good, because people get put away for those results.
But the right of having an opinion is pretty much a pre-condition for the right of Free Speech, so shut your trap, collect your money from Kim's PR agency and go troll some other news site.
You know nothing about the legal system. Fortunately, lawyers and judges do.
Past convictions do get considered in current convictions. Not as evidence that he did it, but in considering if he's an unlucky guy who might have stepped on the wrong side of the law without meaning to, or if he's a career criminal who doesn't care about which laws he breaks this time.
If it weren't for people like Dotcom and the Pirate Bay guys, would there even be a movement for the EFF and EDRI to fight for?
EFF predates everyone else on the list, does that answer your question?
If no one is performing the activity then who cares enough about legitimizing it to fight for it?
You mistake criminals for freedom fighters. There's an important difference between Kim Schmitz and Rosa Park - Rosa wasn't in it for the money.
Do you think prohibition would have ever ended if everyone would have stopped drinking alcohol until it was repealed?
Do you think Al Capone was mainly interested in undoing an unjust law? Do you think the rise of the Mafia was a civil rights movement? Please tell me you aren't that stupid.
Microsoft fucks over partner. News at... Seriously? If this comes unexpected to you, you must have joined/. - or, indeed, this plant - very recently. If I recall correctly, ever since Nokia got put in chains, the question asked here was not if, but when this would happen.
Lesson: If you get in bed with Microsoft, you are a whore. And whores get screwed.
And we want people randomly who threaten to sue people unless they settle out of court for thousands of dollars for profit on our side instead?
Did I step outside when they handed out the dumb pills here?
Here's a really new concept, I should probably patent it: Coins are among the very few things on this planet that only have two sides. Most things have many, many sides.
Do you want to know who I want on my side? The grandmother who was sued by the copyright mafia even though she doesn't even own a computer. And the lawyers who defended her pro bono. And people like NewYorkCountryLawyer, and the EFF, EDRI, sometimes the ACLU. Everyone who helped us out back when Hollywood sued us for DeCSS (yes, I was among the defendants).
Not sleazebag millionaire career criminals. Neither Kim Criminal nor anyone from the copyright mafiaa.
If he can give those groups a swift kick in the dick, quite frankly I wouldn't give a damn if it was Hitler, I'd still be cheering him on.
I wouldn't, though I can't decide if it's because his goons killed millions of people or because my grandfather was one of them.
Yes, even bad people have good sides. But an evil does not turn into a good because it hurts other evil people. I'm sure that the Nazi extermination camps had a few child rapists and murderers in them, by pure chance. Given numbers, it is statistically likely. Still, it's not exactly a widely accepted method of getting rid of a few undiscovered criminals.
And running a criminal enterprise is not a good way to fight the copyright mafia. In fact, quite the opposite, it only makes it easier for their lobbyists to push through more of their evil laws.
When evil fights evil, good is not on the winning side, you fool.
You are making a logic mistake that has turned the world a horrible place ever since the old greeks invented it.
You think there are just two choices. How about the choice to not side with either of the two evils? Now that's a novel concept, I know, but while there is such a thing as a lesser evil, that fact alone does not mean you have to support it.
Evil should be fought, no matter how big or small. Supporting a lesser evil only turns it into the bigger evil over time.
Oh, also - offering false choices that both lead to results the other guy likes is a time-honoured tradition of controlling people. If you think you have to choose between two evils, you are already someones bitch.
The guy has done nothing wrong in our country. He enabled some people to upload things to a website - that's not a crime.
Was everyone who modded you up paid for it or just some of them?
Hello? Evidence obtained clearly shows that he and his gang very, very much encouraged the upload of copyrighted material. They not only knew what was going on, it was a primary objective of the business.
Real heros? What has gone down would be enough to produce a pretty damn good movie and you're questioning if he's been through enough to qualify for some support?
Yes.
I'm sure that a lot of bad guys had a horrible childhood and quite a few unpleasant days later in life. Some of them went out in ways that I don't wish upon anyone.
Does that justify anything they did? Nope. Does it make them heroes? Negative. Do I enjoy seing them suffer? Not either.
But it does mean my sympathies are more limited compared to the suffering of people who do good things because they believe in them, not because it makes them a shitload of money and fuck the rest of the world.
His PR manager is doing a great job, isn't he? It's almost as if rich people could pay for a good image. As if there were companies available who troll social media sites, leave comments on newpaper and blog pages and generally improve your public perception. Oh, wait...
Your first instincts were right. He's just rich enough now to have PR and marketing guys helping him with his image.
He's an egomaniac career criminal who by pure accident was shot this side of the street and now we think he's one of ours. He isn't. He is the exact kind of people we do not want on our side.
I'd say that regardless of your stance on intellectual property, if you dig below the surface then you can see there was some very grubby, nepotistic and borderline criminal politics at work
borderline? It was outright criminal...
in the obliteration of Megaupload and the persecution Dotcom.
...oh, you're just toting the party line.
Here's a deal: I'll agree with you if you get your head out of your ass and agree that the e-mails obtained during the prosecution also show very clearly that Kim and his gang actually were intentionally breaking the law on a large scale with the sole motivation of money, money, money.
Or does that not fit the self-made image of the glorious freedom fighter? Sorry, dude. The real heroes don't live in mansions.
Oh, please. He's an attention whore and trying to stay in the news./. willfully plays along. Will it be reported if I make a New Year's resolution, too?
There's probably half a billion people with half a billion business ideas on the planet right now. Why is Kim Criminals' being reported? Oh yes, because he broke a couple laws that we don't like. How about you support the real heroes today? The ones like the EFF, or in Europe EDRI, who are fighting this fight where it can actually be won - the legal and politics level - and have been doing so for years?
You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.
Because people who are rich enough to own homes like that wouldn't ever have anything inside that is as valuable as the house, and maybe more (paintings, artwork, stuff like that).
Of course they can sue Mega. You can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether they succeed is the interesting question. And that's not quite as easy to say, because courts are pretty good when it comes to looking at the spirit of things, not the letter.
The court would take a good, hard look at Mega and probably conclude that its primary purpose is to trade copyrighted material illegally while taking considerable steps to hide it. That's a criminal conspiracy.
They don't need to look into the files. They just need the internal e-mails, like they did in the Megaupload case.
For example, the US couldn't legalize drugs however much it may want to.
Unlike, say, the Netherlands? Yeah, right...
Furthermore, the UN has something much stronger than military, namely the power to punish states through trade penalties, and those penalties are imposed on any nation that steps out of line, including the US.
No, it doesn't. It's member states do. The UN is merely the place where they agree to do it.
Yes, and that's the only thing he has. The glorification on/. makes me want to puke. The guy is an asshole career criminal. He needs the publicity like a drug, and that's why he's doing it, not for any idealistic reasons.
Not everyone who fights the bad guys is a good guy, people. Sometimes, bad guys fight amongst each other.
You should see a shrink. If the words of a stranger on the Internet make you unhappy, you are emotionally unstable. And that has nothing to do with the argument I made, which is about denying or begrudging someone else his happiness - which I don't do to you. For all I care, you can be as happy as you want.
Nobody should be overly happy, not when there are so many sad things happening in the world. [...] Of course what I have said will anger many people, but it's truth.
"Angry" doesn't even begin to describe it. I've seen people I loved so down that they tried to kill themselves. Do you want to know what I think about people who deny others happiness? They should be taken out back and shot. Twice. Right now.
You are making a dramatic, serious and inexcusible mistake there. You confuse happiness with apathy. You think that people who are happy have no desire of helping others. You think that compassion means feeling horrible because someone else does. You think that people who are happy don't care about others.
And nothing could be further from the truth. People who are unhappy are the ones who stop caring about others. People who are depressed are more likely to fall into apathy than people who are in joy. People who share the feelings of others too much are less likely to be able to help them and more likely to drag them down even further.
Now you will probably argue that you said "overly", but that's a strawman. Who is going to decide on what level of happiness is fine and which is too much? You?
If everyone would be as happy as this dude, the world would be a much better place. Sure, we'd still have hurricanes, but we'd have a lot less war, poverty and inequality.
Now, please take yourself out back and put you out of your misery. We have way too many people like you on this planet, who begrudge other people's happiness.
There's quite a bit of "real" at the core of most religions. The problem is that the part that's real is not what they say it is.
For example, group prayer certainly strengthens a community, communicates shared values etc. And quite a few religious rituals do have psychological effects (not all positive - an exorcism is a pretty good way to give someone mental damage).
That is true for most "old knowledges". Strip away the mysticism from things like Meditation, Tantra or some of the esoteric stuff and you find there is still something there. Tantric sex is pretty cool because it teaches you awareness and presence, for example. Meditation has been scientifically proven to work, even though the golden glowing Buddha you visualise (or whatever) has no existence outside your mind.
There are various forms of Buddhism. What we have in the west is fairly barebone and practical, and thus you are right that the mysticism layer is thin. But back in Tibet, it's a whole different story, there it's not all that different from the christian churches in Europe.
That is what it was phrased as. Here's a quote from President Eisenhower:
"As a former soldier, I am delighted that our veterans are sponsoring a movement to increase our awareness of God in our daily lives. In battle, they learned a great truth-that there are no atheists in the foxholes. They know that in time of test and trial, we instinctively turn to God for new courageâ¦"
As an atheist I would feel very, very insulted. In the same way that a gay person feels rightfully insulted if someone declares homosexually unnatural and says that under condition X, even the gay would find that it takes a woman to make someone really happy.
I feel sorry for you if you can't wrap your head around that. Imagine you are an atheist and you sit in a foxhole, mortars blowing up your friends around you. Now you hear "there are no atheists in foxholes" and how everyone in your situation would "instinctively turn to god".
Man, I would want to shoot the guy in the face who said that.
Common mistake of people who know nothing about leadership and management.
Ive may be a fantastic lead designer. That doesn't mean he would be a good CEO. Or even a mediocre one. Don't promote people because they are excellent at their current jobs - only promote people if you think they will be excellent at their new job.
We would have a lot less incompetent fucks in middle-management if that principle were followed more often.
MS has only ever understood one thing, and that's the old desktop PC paradigm. Everything else they try to shove into that concept. Their first mobile phone OS was a laugh because of that. The first xbox was basically a gaming-oriented PC - which not surprisingly is a halfway-decent way of doing it.
They still don't "get" the entire mobile computing thing. Probably never will. Surface will go the way of the Zune. Quote me.
Slashdot Mirror
What we KNOW:
What you get paid to post.
We know a lot more than that. We know he is a career criminal with several prior convictions. We know he sold his users out to the authorities before. We know he enjoys publicity and living large. We know his motivation is money.
We also know that he knew and strongly encouraged infringing material being uploaded.
There is a reason for the "innocent until proven guilty" philosophy. Too many people,
In dubio pro reo is a formula binding the court, not people's opinion. You are mixing legal with popular reasoning.
Only when you have answers to at least these basic questions should you even consider opining on him.
No, stupid. I live in the real world where I can have an opinion on other people without going through six years of fact-finding, proceedings and appeals first. Society works that way, it doesn't work the other way. The courts work that other way, and that's good, because people get put away for those results.
But the right of having an opinion is pretty much a pre-condition for the right of Free Speech, so shut your trap, collect your money from Kim's PR agency and go troll some other news site.
You know nothing about the legal system. Fortunately, lawyers and judges do.
Past convictions do get considered in current convictions. Not as evidence that he did it, but in considering if he's an unlucky guy who might have stepped on the wrong side of the law without meaning to, or if he's a career criminal who doesn't care about which laws he breaks this time.
And the judgement on Kim Criminal is in.
If it weren't for people like Dotcom and the Pirate Bay guys, would there even be a movement for the EFF and EDRI to fight for?
EFF predates everyone else on the list, does that answer your question?
If no one is performing the activity then who cares enough about legitimizing it to fight for it?
You mistake criminals for freedom fighters. There's an important difference between Kim Schmitz and Rosa Park - Rosa wasn't in it for the money.
Do you think prohibition would have ever ended if everyone would have stopped drinking alcohol until it was repealed?
Do you think Al Capone was mainly interested in undoing an unjust law? Do you think the rise of the Mafia was a civil rights movement? Please tell me you aren't that stupid.
Microsoft fucks over partner. News at... Seriously? If this comes unexpected to you, you must have joined /. - or, indeed, this plant - very recently. If I recall correctly, ever since Nokia got put in chains, the question asked here was not if, but when this would happen.
Lesson: If you get in bed with Microsoft, you are a whore. And whores get screwed.
And we want people randomly who threaten to sue people unless they settle out of court for thousands of dollars for profit on our side instead?
Did I step outside when they handed out the dumb pills here?
Here's a really new concept, I should probably patent it: Coins are among the very few things on this planet that only have two sides. Most things have many, many sides.
Do you want to know who I want on my side? The grandmother who was sued by the copyright mafia even though she doesn't even own a computer. And the lawyers who defended her pro bono. And people like NewYorkCountryLawyer, and the EFF, EDRI, sometimes the ACLU. Everyone who helped us out back when Hollywood sued us for DeCSS (yes, I was among the defendants).
Not sleazebag millionaire career criminals. Neither Kim Criminal nor anyone from the copyright mafiaa.
If he can give those groups a swift kick in the dick, quite frankly I wouldn't give a damn if it was Hitler, I'd still be cheering him on.
I wouldn't, though I can't decide if it's because his goons killed millions of people or because my grandfather was one of them.
Yes, even bad people have good sides. But an evil does not turn into a good because it hurts other evil people. I'm sure that the Nazi extermination camps had a few child rapists and murderers in them, by pure chance. Given numbers, it is statistically likely. Still, it's not exactly a widely accepted method of getting rid of a few undiscovered criminals.
And running a criminal enterprise is not a good way to fight the copyright mafia. In fact, quite the opposite, it only makes it easier for their lobbyists to push through more of their evil laws.
When evil fights evil, good is not on the winning side, you fool.
You are making a logic mistake that has turned the world a horrible place ever since the old greeks invented it.
You think there are just two choices. How about the choice to not side with either of the two evils? Now that's a novel concept, I know, but while there is such a thing as a lesser evil, that fact alone does not mean you have to support it.
Evil should be fought, no matter how big or small. Supporting a lesser evil only turns it into the bigger evil over time.
Oh, also - offering false choices that both lead to results the other guy likes is a time-honoured tradition of controlling people. If you think you have to choose between two evils, you are already someones bitch.
The guy has done nothing wrong in our country. He enabled some people to upload things to a website - that's not a crime.
Was everyone who modded you up paid for it or just some of them?
Hello? Evidence obtained clearly shows that he and his gang very, very much encouraged the upload of copyrighted material. They not only knew what was going on, it was a primary objective of the business.
He's a criminal, and has been all his life.
Real heros?
What has gone down would be enough to produce a pretty damn good movie and you're questioning if he's been through enough to qualify for some support?
Yes.
I'm sure that a lot of bad guys had a horrible childhood and quite a few unpleasant days later in life. Some of them went out in ways that I don't wish upon anyone.
Does that justify anything they did? Nope.
Does it make them heroes? Negative.
Do I enjoy seing them suffer? Not either.
But it does mean my sympathies are more limited compared to the suffering of people who do good things because they believe in them, not because it makes them a shitload of money and fuck the rest of the world.
Lately I can't seem to fault this guy....
His PR manager is doing a great job, isn't he? It's almost as if rich people could pay for a good image. As if there were companies available who troll social media sites, leave comments on newpaper and blog pages and generally improve your public perception. Oh, wait...
Your first instincts were right. He's just rich enough now to have PR and marketing guys helping him with his image.
He's an egomaniac career criminal who by pure accident was shot this side of the street and now we think he's one of ours. He isn't. He is the exact kind of people we do not want on our side.
I'd say that regardless of your stance on intellectual property, if you dig below the surface then you can see there was some very grubby, nepotistic and borderline criminal politics at work
borderline? It was outright criminal...
in the obliteration of Megaupload and the persecution Dotcom.
...oh, you're just toting the party line.
Here's a deal: I'll agree with you if you get your head out of your ass and agree that the e-mails obtained during the prosecution also show very clearly that Kim and his gang actually were intentionally breaking the law on a large scale with the sole motivation of money, money, money.
Or does that not fit the self-made image of the glorious freedom fighter? Sorry, dude. The real heroes don't live in mansions.
Oh, please. He's an attention whore and trying to stay in the news. /. willfully plays along. Will it be reported if I make a New Year's resolution, too?
There's probably half a billion people with half a billion business ideas on the planet right now. Why is Kim Criminals' being reported? Oh yes, because he broke a couple laws that we don't like.
How about you support the real heroes today? The ones like the EFF, or in Europe EDRI, who are fighting this fight where it can actually be won - the legal and politics level - and have been doing so for years?
You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.
Because people who are rich enough to own homes like that wouldn't ever have anything inside that is as valuable as the house, and maybe more (paintings, artwork, stuff like that).
Not to mention emotional values.
It was hilarious, she carried on for 5 or 10 minutes shouting at me, and she sounded like she actually believed it.
She probably did.
For the low-paying ground-level jobs, it is easier to fool people than to convince them to participate in a crime.
That's amateur legal theory and pretty dangerous.
Of course they can sue Mega. You can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether they succeed is the interesting question. And that's not quite as easy to say, because courts are pretty good when it comes to looking at the spirit of things, not the letter.
The court would take a good, hard look at Mega and probably conclude that its primary purpose is to trade copyrighted material illegally while taking considerable steps to hide it. That's a criminal conspiracy.
They don't need to look into the files. They just need the internal e-mails, like they did in the Megaupload case.
For example, the US couldn't legalize drugs however much it may want to.
Unlike, say, the Netherlands? Yeah, right...
Furthermore, the UN has something much stronger than military, namely the power to punish states through trade penalties, and those penalties are imposed on any nation that steps out of line, including the US.
No, it doesn't. It's member states do. The UN is merely the place where they agree to do it.
He has pretty big balls.
Yes, and that's the only thing he has. The glorification on /. makes me want to puke. The guy is an asshole career criminal. He needs the publicity like a drug, and that's why he's doing it, not for any idealistic reasons.
Not everyone who fights the bad guys is a good guy, people. Sometimes, bad guys fight amongst each other.
Unless you decide to shoot me based on your metric.
I don't care if you die happy or unhappy.
And since you're the executioner, you'd be "denying happiness" to their surviving kin.
No, I'd be causing them anguish. That's not the same thing though there is a correlation.
To get to my actual point - I doubt you'll improve the world by killing off people on that metric.
True.
You should see a shrink. If the words of a stranger on the Internet make you unhappy, you are emotionally unstable. And that has nothing to do with the argument I made, which is about denying or begrudging someone else his happiness - which I don't do to you. For all I care, you can be as happy as you want.
Nobody should be overly happy, not when there are so many sad things happening in the world. [...] Of course what I have said will anger many people, but it's truth.
"Angry" doesn't even begin to describe it. I've seen people I loved so down that they tried to kill themselves. Do you want to know what I think about people who deny others happiness? They should be taken out back and shot. Twice. Right now.
You are making a dramatic, serious and inexcusible mistake there. You confuse happiness with apathy. You think that people who are happy have no desire of helping others. You think that compassion means feeling horrible because someone else does. You think that people who are happy don't care about others.
And nothing could be further from the truth. People who are unhappy are the ones who stop caring about others. People who are depressed are more likely to fall into apathy than people who are in joy. People who share the feelings of others too much are less likely to be able to help them and more likely to drag them down even further.
Now you will probably argue that you said "overly", but that's a strawman. Who is going to decide on what level of happiness is fine and which is too much? You?
If everyone would be as happy as this dude, the world would be a much better place. Sure, we'd still have hurricanes, but we'd have a lot less war, poverty and inequality.
Now, please take yourself out back and put you out of your misery. We have way too many people like you on this planet, who begrudge other people's happiness.
There's quite a bit of "real" at the core of most religions. The problem is that the part that's real is not what they say it is.
For example, group prayer certainly strengthens a community, communicates shared values etc. And quite a few religious rituals do have psychological effects (not all positive - an exorcism is a pretty good way to give someone mental damage).
That is true for most "old knowledges". Strip away the mysticism from things like Meditation, Tantra or some of the esoteric stuff and you find there is still something there. Tantric sex is pretty cool because it teaches you awareness and presence, for example. Meditation has been scientifically proven to work, even though the golden glowing Buddha you visualise (or whatever) has no existence outside your mind.
There are various forms of Buddhism. What we have in the west is fairly barebone and practical, and thus you are right that the mysticism layer is thin. But back in Tibet, it's a whole different story, there it's not all that different from the christian churches in Europe.
That is what it was phrased as. Here's a quote from President Eisenhower:
"As a former soldier, I am delighted that our veterans are sponsoring a movement to increase our awareness of God in our daily lives. In battle, they learned a great truth-that there are no atheists in the foxholes. They know that in time of test and trial, we instinctively turn to God for new courageâ¦"
As an atheist I would feel very, very insulted. In the same way that a gay person feels rightfully insulted if someone declares homosexually unnatural and says that under condition X, even the gay would find that it takes a woman to make someone really happy.
I feel sorry for you if you can't wrap your head around that. Imagine you are an atheist and you sit in a foxhole, mortars blowing up your friends around you. Now you hear "there are no atheists in foxholes" and how everyone in your situation would "instinctively turn to god".
Man, I would want to shoot the guy in the face who said that.
Common mistake of people who know nothing about leadership and management.
Ive may be a fantastic lead designer. That doesn't mean he would be a good CEO. Or even a mediocre one. Don't promote people because they are excellent at their current jobs - only promote people if you think they will be excellent at their new job.
We would have a lot less incompetent fucks in middle-management if that principle were followed more often.
Exactly.
MS has only ever understood one thing, and that's the old desktop PC paradigm. Everything else they try to shove into that concept. Their first mobile phone OS was a laugh because of that. The first xbox was basically a gaming-oriented PC - which not surprisingly is a halfway-decent way of doing it.
They still don't "get" the entire mobile computing thing. Probably never will. Surface will go the way of the Zune. Quote me.